![]() ![]() But that's because I was still (and probably always will) evaluating them with hound standards. ![]() Just weren't my cup of tea and were never gonna suit my expectations for mouth, hunt, and tree power. Maybe I wasn't exposed to the right ones, but I looked at feists, even tried one. I switched from coon hunting hounds awhile back. I have had pitbulls that we're absolutely nuts over Squirrels.ĭepends on what he expects from the dog. I know people that use treeing curs and another with a Cajun Squirrel dog. ![]() Report this post to a moderator | IP: Logged UKC Forums > Departments > UKC Curs and Feists > Good squirrel dog?īuddy of mine wants to get into squirrel hunting and is wondering good breeds to choose from what are yalls favorote breeds that are good squirrel dogsĪin't no better noise than a bawl mouth redbone on tree!!!! Once, Randall promised him a steak if he won.UKC Website :: Hunting Ops :: All-Breed Sports :: Registration :: UKC Online Store Randall had to climb the tree and cut him out with a chain saw.īilly the Kid showed his gratitude by beginning to win squirrel-hunting competitions all around the Southeast. As soon as Randall bought him, Billy the Kid chased a squirrel up inside a hollow sassafras on the ridge above their homes, where Randall found him staring pensively out a knothole thirty feet above the ground. ![]() We ain’t got that far.”Įventually Chrisman passed on his love for feists to his son Randall, who, on a November morning fourteen years ago, talked him into selling him Billy the Kid, the dog against whom he now measures all others. Their one-track mind, their dedication, their smarts - we just don’t know how intelligent they are. “But I never was as enthused about any one dog as I am feists. I’ve been that way all my life,” says Chrisman. To Chrisman, raising dogs for their vision, their tenacity and intelligence, their hearts - instead of for the way they looked - brought back the very reason for the bond between man and dog. He found his truth elsewhere.įeists had nearly disappeared when he started breeding and raising them more than twenty years ago. He ran for sheriff of Jefferson County in 1974, but lost. Chrisman retired from the zinc mines, but he was in law enforcement for ten years. He has also discovered that a yellow salve he got from the vet in Newport works well on his earaches. Last year he accidentally drilled a hole through his finger, so he went to the truck for the same Cut-Heal ointment that he uses for his feists’ hunting injuries. What is good enough for them is good enough for him. What they do in the woods means everything.”Ĭhrisman shares everything in his life with his feists. The breed is too diverse, says the American Kennel Club, for official recognition. There are natural bob tails, straight “pencil” tails. Small, chunky of body, slender of leg and paw and their head triangular, they are tricolored with spots red and white red black black and tan blue and white red brindle white. Their dogs vary almost as much as the stories of their origin. Feist lovers, most of whom live in the Southeast and the South, are proud of that. What they do in the woods means everything.” Maybe the progeny of these dogs returned to the New World, their rodent obsession even stronger from the rat, fox, and Manchester terrier blood. When the Europeans arrived, they may have taken a few home and crossed them with terriers. William Faulkner’s story “The Bear” includes a particularly brave fyce “not much bigger than a rat and possessing that sort of courage which had long since stopped being bravery and had become foolhardiness.” In a March 26, 1770, entry in his diaries, George Washington mentions a “foist looking yellow cur.” And in a poem by Abraham Lincoln, fice trail a bear “with instant cry.” Chrisman told me he believed the feist’s ancestors were the dogs of the American Indians. The members of the association tell me that nobody knows exactly where feists came from. He stops to accept a pat on the head, but seems puzzled as to how men could sit talking on the porch with a ridge of woods and its potential for squirrels so close. C4, a lemon-and-white feist with yellow eyes and double dewclaws, meanders among us. Their reason for being in the association is the feist, a little dog that, for some mysterious reason, once his switch is flipped, lives for the ripple of a squirrel’s tail. They are all familiar with the concept of the switch. Scattered around on his porch, the members of the East Tennessee Squirrel Hunters’ Association nod in agreement. “It’s like one day a switch goes off in the dog’s head and he knows he is a squirrel dog. Then one morning Bull Durham treed seven squirrels in a half hour. “I would take him out to the woods and he would just lay down and look at me and swap his tail in the leaves.” “I raised a dog, his name was Bull Durham, and it was eighteen months before he would tree,” says F. Squirrel dogs are not trained, but awakened. ![]()
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